When the Systems We Depend On Fail Us

At least 82 people, including children, are dead in Texas because we cannot tell the difference between wasteful bureaucracy and useful regulations.

At least 82 people are dead in Central Texas. Twenty-eight of them children. Ten young girls and a counselor from a summer camp remain missing. I keep coming back to that number—82—and thinking about what each death represents. A family destroyed. A future ended. Dreams that will never be realized.

It felt wrong to write this while families are still searching, still hoping. But maybe that's exactly when we need to ask the hardest questions: What do we expect from our government? What does it mean to live in a society that's supposed to protect us?

I've spent months thinking about what happens when the systems we depend on—quietly, invisibly—start to break down. When the institutions that are supposed to work without us noticing suddenly fail catastrophically. The Guadalupe River surged over 20 feet in less than two hours. Storm warnings underestimated rainfall totals. Rural communities had no idea what was coming. The coordination needed for rapid response was hampered by leadership vacancies at the very agencies tasked with keeping us safe.

This isn't a coincidence. Over recent months, NOAA, the National Weather Service, and FEMA have faced deep budget cuts and staffing losses. The National Weathers Service has been particularly hard hit by personnel cuts, with key leadership positions vacant and forecasting offices understaffed. When the river started rising, some locals admitted they "had no reason to believe" such devastation would come. The warnings that might have saved lives either didn't reach people or weren't severe enough to convey the actual threat.

But the warning system failures weren't just federal. Local officials in Kerr County had discussed installing flood warning systemsj after previous disasters but rejected them as too expensive. The county, with a $67 million annual budget, deemed a $1 million early warning system "extravagant"—even as Texas lawmakers approved $51 billion in property tax cuts while allocating only $669 million statewide for flood protection projects.

This tells you everything about what we value. We'll spend fifty times more on tax cuts than flood protection, then act surprised when people die. It's the same mentality driving our national conversation about how to build things faster, where cutting costs and regulations always seems more important than cutting risks.

We're in the middle of a national conversation about how to build things faster. Books like Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson's Abundance argue we can solve our problems by cutting red tape and loosening regulations. They point to Texas as proof—since 2015, the state has authorized construction of twice Li as many homes as California despite having 9 million fewer residents. This gets held up as evidence that deregulation works, that bureaucracy is the enemy of progress.

But last week we saw what that philosophy looks like when the stakes are life and death. Camps, homes, and entire neighborhoods built in flood zones that stronger protections might have prevented or required to be built safely. The very regulations that get dismissed as bureaucratic obstacles—floodplain protections, engineering reviews, mitigation designs—these aren't just paperwork. They're the difference between a home that floods and one that doesn't. Between a camp that survives and one that becomes a tragedy.

I grew up watching my dad struggle without healthcare, watching my community's infrastructure crumble as the jobs disappeared. I know what it looks like when systems fail people. When the things we built to take care of each other—the quiet, invisible networks of protection—get dismantled piece by piece.

We're not confused about what's happening. We see it clearly. Cash is king. Profit is the motive. Regulators are in bed with developers and politicians have sold out our safety with everything else. We just feel powerless to stop it and hope the tragedy never lands on us. We hope disasters stay something we read about, not something that sweeps our kids away. We try to get lucky or be smart, but that's the thing about a crumbling society: you can't outsmart it or always dodge it. Sometimes it finds you anyway.

I'm not going to pretend the status quo is working. The endless regulatory oversight, the countless stakeholders, the process that treats the shadow a multistory building casts with the same scrutiny as the risk of being washed away and drowned in a flood zone—this makes us jaded. We begin to sense it's all bullshit, process without purpose. Too often, it is.

Too many rules, especially senseless ones, may be as dangerous as too few because they erode trust and confidence. When everything is treated as life or death, nothing feels like it actually is. People stop believing the system serves any real purpose beyond perpetuating itself.

The answer isn't to burn it all down. Some systems actually work when we need them most. The key is distinguishing between what protects us and what just slows us down.

We don't need a false choice between building slow and safe or building fast and broken. We can build fast and smart. Permit processes can be risk-based: simple modifications get expedited review while high-risk builds in flood zones require proof of resilience, water management, hazard mitigation. We can restore federal funding to forecasting and alert services, especially in rural and underserved regions. We can hold developers accountable for resilience before homes are sold.

As climate change accelerates, these risks become more real, not less. This is exactly the moment to improve our protective systems, not dismantle them. The people who died in Texas weren't casualties of excessive regulation—they were victims of a philosophy that treats safety as optional, that sees protective oversight as an obstacle rather than a necessity.

We're turning our backs on government as a collective solution, as our way to defend ourselves against those who are cavalier with our safety and willing to ignore risks. But regulators aren't the enemy. They're partners in quality. Through better customer service, tiered permitting, and restored trust, we can reimagine abundance not as unchecked growth, but as abundance of safety, resilience, and dignity.

Because homes that flood aren't homes at all. Affordable housing that costs lives isn't affordable—it's deadly.

Eighty-two people died because we've lost the ability to distinguish between regulations that save lives and bureaucracy that just wastes time. We've let the process become so convoluted, so divorced from actual safety, that when real protection was needed it wasn't there.

Climate change means these disasters are coming faster and hitting harder. We don't have the luxury of pretending all regulations are the same—some keep people alive, others just keep lawyers busy. If we can't tell the difference, more families will get that phone call, more communities will watch their children get swept away.

The choice isn't whether to regulate or deregulate. It's whether we still have enough sense to protect what matters and enough will to build systems that actually work. Whether we can still take care of each other when it counts. Time is running out to get this right